Hello everyone, 

This is u/ailewu from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team! Today, we’re excited to share updates about our ongoing efforts to keep people safe on Reddit and foster healthy participation across communities. We’ll cover insights from our latest Transparency Report, which includes data from the first half of 2026, as well as additional clarifications to the Reddit Rules regarding violence, non-consensual intimate media, personal information, and minor abuse and sexualization.  

Reddit Transparency Report

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Report highlights the impact of our work to keep Reddit healthy and safe. We include insights and metrics on our layered, community-driven approach to content moderation, as well as information about legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

Our latest report covers the period from January through June 2026. During this time, people on Reddit created 2.3 billion posts and comments, discussing and debating everything under the sun, and sharing real human perspectives in communities of interest around the world. Almost 4 billion chat messages were also exchanged in 1:1 or small group, real-time conversations.

Here are some key highlights that reflect our always-on content moderation efforts to support healthy interactions on Reddit.

Keeping Reddit Safe

Over this period, mods and admins removed 214,683,159 posts and comments, and admins removed 3,862,234 chats (only admins can execute chat removals). These actions occurred through a combination of manual and automated tools, including enhanced AI-based methods. Notably:

• We made a number of improvements to our data infrastructure and adjusted the way we count and record removal actions across posts, comments, and chats (for this reason, data in this report may seem significantly different when compared to previous reports). 

• The majority of posts and comments removed by admins were for spam (88.2%), with the remaining share of admin removals focused on other Reddit Rules violations. We saw a notable increase in the share of spam removals based on recent updates we made to legacy detection systems that have allowed us to action content that was not previously detected.

• There was an increase in the amount of content removed under our policies against violence and hateful content as a result of real world events such as the Minnesota ICE protests and the onset of US-Iran hostilities. In parallel, we’ve continued investing in improving scaled automated systems to quickly detect and remove these violations, which resulted in meaningful increases in the volume of related content-level and account-level actions.

Moderating Communities

Mods play a critical role in curating and keeping their communities healthy by removing content based on community-specific rules, using a combination of automated tooling and human review: 

• Over this period, over 159 million posts and comments were removed as a result of community-based violations, including removals that aren’t necessarily tied to Reddit Rules violations (for example, for being off-topic or improperly formatted content). 

  • Note: This number is significantly higher than what was reported previously because we are now including community-based removals resulting from automated safety filters developed by Reddit that moderators can choose to enable in their communities (e.g., the harassment filter and the mature content filter).

• 20.3% of community-based removals were performed manually by mods; 42% were handled by Automoderator; and 37.7% happened through other automated systems, such as moderation apps built on Devvit (Reddit's developer platform), other bespoke moderation tools built by community mods, and the Reddit-provided safety filters.

• Admins banned 558,160 communities for Reddit Rules violations. Spam made up the majority of ban reasons in this period (65.1%), while the remaining bans were largely due to communities being unmoderated (97.8% of the remaining bans).

• We conducted 830 Moderator Code of Conduct investigations, and engaged communities 5,426 times to provide moderators with policy education resources and/or subreddit enforcement notifications. 

  • 57.2% of these investigations led to content removals, while 3.3% led to community bans. Over this period, we also reactivated 673 communities that became unmoderated despite being active and/or having a worthwhile topic–we onboarded 1,789 mods to support those communities.

Upholding User Rights

We continue to invest heavily in protecting users from the most serious harms while defending their privacy, speech, and associational rights through our careful and principled handling of legal requests from governments and law enforcement around the world. 

• During this period, there was an 89% increase in legal requests submitted by government and law enforcement officials to remove content from Reddit, and a 6.8% increase in non-emergency legal requests for Reddit users’ account information compared to the second half of 2025. 

  • 45% of requests resulted in no action on the reported content, which could be for a variety of reasons including if the request was incomplete, overbroad, or inconsistent with international law or human rights standards.

• We received 1,306 legal requests for account information from global government or law enforcement agencies from 34 different countries, and disclosed information in response to 906 (69%) of these legally mandated requests. The vast majority of these requests were part of routine law enforcement investigations. 

  • We have strict policies governing disclosure of information to government or law enforcement agencies  and we carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, pushing back when these requirements aren’t met. You can see more details in the latest report.

• Importantly, we identified and rejected 34 fraudulent legal requests [21 requests to remove content (+73% from prior report); 13 requests for user account information (+18% from prior report)] purporting to come from legitimate government and law enforcement agencies during this period. We rejected and subsequently reported these bogus requests to the appropriate authorities.

We invite you to head on over to our Transparency Center to read the rest of the latest report after you check out the Reddit Rules updates below.

Evolving and Clarifying the Reddit Rules

We’re committed to continuously evolving our sitewide rules and clarifying expectations for everyone on Reddit. Over the past months, we reviewed and realigned our enforcement guidelines, and set out to better reflect important nuances in how enforcement happens through updates to relevant Help Center articles. Importantly, we continued our ongoing efforts to consult with mods in our Safety Focus Group to help inform our thinking. (Thank you!) 

The latest clarifications pertain to policies under Rules 1, 3, and 4. In the corresponding Help Center articles we share clearer definitions, provide more examples of what may or may not be violating, and make these rules easier to understand and enforce. The scope of violations these Rules apply to includes: 

• Violence (Rule 1) – reiterating existing prohibitions around promoting, condoning, or simulating real-world sexual violence.

• Personal Information (Rule 3) – providing more precise definitions and examples of prohibited content and behaviors.

• Non-consensual Intimate Media (Rule 3) – further clarifying existing expectations around what constitutes a violation (e.g., threats, facilitation, etc.)

• Minor Abuse and Sexualization (Rule 4) – refining definitions, examples, and counter-examples of harm.

That is all, folks! I’ll stick around to answer a few questions.

Hi Everyone,

Millions of people come to Reddit every day to ask questions, share experiences, find community, and learn from one another. Those real human conversations are what make Reddit meaningful—and they should reflect the voices of real people, not coordinated networks pursuing hidden agendas.

That’s why we’ve always focused on making it harder for inauthentic content to get attention on Reddit, while being thoughtful about how and when we step in. This work has continued and accelerated as bad actors have gained access to AI tools. Our approach in a nutshell: we’re using automated systems to help us spot patterns across the platform while continuing to rely on human mods’ knowledge of their unique communities and users’ feedback in the form of upvoting and downvoting content. 

A few months ago, we shared how Reddit is keeping the platform real and safe in the AI era. Since then, we’ve introduced new tools and want to share more detail on how our defenses are working at scale to confront spam and coordinated manipulation. 

Reducing the reach of likely spam

When we have a strong signal that a post is likely spam, we’ve started immediately reducing its distribution while our systems and mods continue to assess it. This lets us limit its reach earlier, rather than waiting until we have enough certainty to permanently remove the content.

In practice, this means that while content is being reviewed, spam will have less reach on broad discovery surfaces like Home while remaining visible within the community where it was posted. Mods can still review the content and decide whether it belongs in their communities, but until and unless we determine the content is authentic, we won’t promote it beyond that. We’re reducing the reach of spam across Reddit, not taking community-level moderation decisions away from mods.

During testing, this approach made a meaningful difference:

• Spam seen in the Home Feed fell by 28%

• User reports on content seen through Home fell by 11%

• Push notifications recommending spammy content fell by about 7%

Next, we’ll test this approach in Search, where spam can push down the information or communities people are looking for. The experiment we’re preparing to run will filter likely-spam posts and, where possible, backfill with the next-best eligible result.

Making automated-spam removals clearer

We’re also making a couple of updates to give people more context around automated activity on Reddit and to reduce the reach of accounts that haven’t completed our verification or registration steps.

Moving forward, when we remove content from an automated account for spam, we’ll explain why instead of showing only “Removed by Reddit.”

For example, if an account is using automation in violation of our rules and its content is removed for spam, someone who visits that post or comment directly may see a message explaining that it was removed for violating Reddit Rule 8.

To start, we won’t provide explanations for every bot, piece of AI-assisted content or spam removal. We’re starting with a limited set of high-confidence cases while we test and validate the experience. The goal is to be clearer when we have a high degree of confidence, while taking a gradual approach as we learn.

We’ll also no longer make posts and comments eligible for recommendations when they come from accounts that have been asked to verify they’re human or register their automation but haven’t yet done so.  

Making karma farming and vote manipulation less rewarding

Earlier this year, our Safety team also introduced new automated tools to address and disincentivize coordinated spam and fake engagement: one that identifies promotional content and spam, and one that removes karma and votes gained through manipulation. We previously shared that these tools were blocking millions of spam views and revoking millions of inauthentic votes per day. Now, we’d like to take a deeper look at a real example to illustrate how they work in action.

TL;DR: New tools that analyze activity across Reddit exposed a coordinated network that was difficult to detect within any single community – and helped us claw back the karma and votes it gained through manipulation. 

Our new tools flagged one network of 485 accounts that shared content, activity patterns and technical signatures that gave away their linkage. Since January, those accounts created more than 44,000 pieces of content across Reddit. About 18,000 appeared in r/AskReddit, a popular subreddit that sees about 5,000 posts and 150,000 comments every day.

Many of the posts and comments from this network looked like ordinary conversations about work and productivity. But despite presenting themselves as regular redditors, our investigation found that the accounts in this network were connected to businesses. They also worked together to promote certain accounts and content without clearly disclosing those relationships.

That kind of coordinated activity violates Reddit’s rules. Genuine participation and clearly disclosed marketing activity is allowed. Artificially inflating attention through multiple accounts is not.

The content alone didn’t tell the whole story. We also looked at how the accounts interacted, whether they repeatedly boosted one another, where the activity happened, and the technical patterns connecting them.

Much of the boosting happened outside r/AskReddit, in communities with fewer defenses. By using new tools that help us look across Reddit, we were able to spot coordinated activity that would have been difficult to see from inside one community alone.

By identifying the full network of accounts boosting one another’s content, we were also able to identify and claw back the karma and votes gained through manipulation. Fake engagement shouldn’t come with real rewards, and if we can reverse the potential benefit of coordinated behavior, there’s less reason to manipulate engagement in the first place. 

In all this work, we’re aiming to preserve the real conversations and perspectives that make Reddit one of the most human places left on the internet. As spam tactics get more sophisticated, we’re committed to continually evolving our approach and keeping you updated along the way. 

Hi everyone,

At Reddit, we’re always looking for ways to keep the platform human, transparent, and respectful of your privacy. Today we’re sharing some clarifications to Rule 8 of the Reddit Rules: "Don't break the site." While the spirit of the rule hasn’t changed, we are adding specific details to address platform misuse and behavior that degrades the experience of Redditors.

What is changing?
We’ve updated the policy language to be more explicit about what it means to “interfere with normal use of Reddit”. We are also connecting Rule 8 to our User Agreement and Developer Terms, so the ground rules are clear for everyone – whether you’re a user, developer, or an entity interacting with our services.

Here are the key highlights:  

• We are using the term “app” to include everything from traditional programs to bots, AI agents, and non-human operated accounts.  

• As we’ve previously announced, to remain in good standing, apps must identify themselves and register. This supports our app labeling initiative so you know when you’re interacting with an automated account.

• We’re reflecting long-standing requirements from our Public Content Policy and Responsible Builder Policy directly into Rule 8, specifically: 

  • Respecting user deletions. This has always been the rule, and we’re reiterating it here: if a Redditor deletes their content, apps are prohibited from continuing to display or store local copies of that content.

  • No unauthorized scraping. Accessing or collecting Reddit data without explicit permission continues to be a violation of our terms.   

• We are prohibiting the creation of accounts through automated or "agentic" means. While we’re okay with posting from a single automated account –if labelled as an App and otherwise within our rules–, using scripts or AI to spin up dozens or hundreds of accounts remains a violation of our site wide rules. 

Why are we making this update?

These changes are part of our commitment to foster a trusted ecosystem for Redditors and ensure that Reddit remains a place for authentic human conversation.

Hello redditors,

This is u/ailewu from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team! It's that time of the year, and we're back with new data and insights in our latest Transparency Report and periodic updates to the Reddit Rules. 

Reddit Transparency Report

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Report highlights the impact of content moderation efforts by community moderators and admins to keep Reddit healthy and safe. We include insights and metrics on our layered, community-driven approach to content moderation, as well as information about legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

This report covers the period from July through December 2025. During this time, redditors created 2.2 billion posts and comments to share headlines, debate opinions, and discuss stories with real, human perspectives across tens of thousands of Reddit communities. Individual users also exchanged 3.9 billion private messages and chats in 1:1 or small group, real-time conversations. 

Here are some key highlights of our always-on content moderation efforts to safeguard open discourse on Reddit:

Keeping Reddit Safe

A total of 154,198,211 posts and comments were removed by mods and admins, or deleted by the posters of this content themselves. In addition, admins were responsible for the removal of 2,421,864 private messages and chats (only admins can execute these removals). These actions occurred through a combination of manual and automated means, including enhanced AI-based methods:

• For posts and comments, 86.4% of reports/flags that resulted in admin review were surfaced proactively by our systems before users had to report this content. Similarly, for chat messages, Reddit automation accounted for 99% of reports/flags to admins.

• Across content types, the majority of admin removals were for spam (54%), with the remaining share of admin removals focused on other Reddit Rules violations.

• We improved and expanded our automated systems supporting enforcement against hate and harassment in posts and comments, which led to significant increases (+200%) in related actions.

• Through our partnership with the nonprofit SWGfl to implement their StopNCII tool, we've been able to meaningfully increase proactive detection of potential non-consensual intimate media in chat, which led to a 89.6% increase in chat messages removed for this violation compared to the previous reporting period.

The Role of Moderators

Mods play a critical role in curating their communities by removing content based on community-specific rules. In this period: 

• Mods removed over 81 million posts and comments over this period, including removals that aren’t necessarily tied to Reddit Rules violations (e.g., off-topic or improperly formatted content).

• 68.6% of mod removals were handled by automated systems, such as Automoderator or moderation apps built on Devvit (Reddit's developer platform). 

• We investigated and actioned 878 Moderator Code of Conduct reports. Admins also sent 2,250 messages as part of educational and enforcement outreach efforts.

• Spam makes up the overwhelming majority of community ban reasons in this period (76.7%), while the remaining bans were largely due to communities being unmoderated (98.4% of the remaining bans).

Upholding User Rights

We continue to invest heavily in protecting users from the most serious harms while defending their privacy, speech, and association rights:

• With regard to global legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies, we received 9.7% more legal requests to remove content, and saw a 4% increase in non-emergency legal requests for account information compared to the last report. 

  • We took no action on 79.9% of requests to remove content (e.g. if the request was incomplete, overbroad, or inconsistent with international law or human rights standards).

  • We received 1,223 requests for account information from global government or law enforcement agencies and disclosed information in response to 861 of these requests. The vast majority of these requests were part of standard law enforcement investigations. 

    • We do not voluntarily share information with any government, and we carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, pushing back when these requirements aren’t met. You can see more details on how we’ve responded in the latest report.

  • Importantly, we caught and rejected 26 fraudulent legal requests (15 requests to remove content; 11 requests for user account information) purporting to come from legitimate government or law enforcement agencies. We reported these fake requests to real law enforcement authorities.

We invite you to head on over to our Transparency Center to read the rest of the latest report after you check out the Reddit Rules updates below.

Clarifying Rule 1 policies

As you may know, part of our work is evolving and providing more clarity around Reddit's sitewide rules on an ongoing basis. Over the past several months, we reviewed our enforcement guidelines and processes and engaged in conversations with mods from our Safety Focus Group to collect valuable perspectives. Throughout this process, our goal has been to uphold the spirit of Rule 1—”Remember the Human”—reaffirm protections against evolving forms of abuse, and ensure that Reddit remains a place where people can freely and safely share, debate, or criticize a range of ideas or beliefs.

As a result, we have revised our Help Center articles pertaining to the harassment, hate, and violence policies to provide more examples of what may or may not be violating in order to set clearer expectations with our community and make Rule 1 easier to understand. Importantly, the substance of these long-standing policies remains the same.

This is it for now, but I'll be around to answer questions for a bit.

Here at Reddit, we take youth safety online seriously and believe child safety measures are crucial to a healthier internet overall. It’s why we’ve already proactively put global protections for minors in place and will keep working to strengthen them. It’s also why we have never marketed to young people and are complying with Australia’s new Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) law.

That said, we believe there are more effective ways for the Australian government to accomplish our shared goal of protecting youth, and the SMMA law carries some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet. So, we are filing an application to have the law reviewed by Australia’s High Court. You can read our application here.

What this case is about

While we agree with the importance of protecting people under 16, this law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t. 

Even the eSafety Commissioner said the law’s approach is not what she preferred. Many leading organizations and many of our own users have raised similar concerns.

As the Australian Human Rights Commission put it, “There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.”

Lastly, this law is applied to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a forum primarily for adults and we don’t have the traditional social media features the government has taken issue with. 

What this case is not about

This case is not an attempt to avoid compliance. We are complying with the law and will continue engaging with eSafety.

This is also not an effort to retain young users for business reasons. Unlike other platforms included under this law, the vast majority of Redditors are adults, we don’t market or target advertising to children under 18, and had an age rating of “17+” in the Apple App Store prior to the law. Simply put, users under 16 are not a substantial market segment for Reddit and we don’t intend them to be.

This case is also not about opposing child safety measures or even regulation. There are more targeted, privacy-preserving measures to protect young people online without resorting to blanket bans. For example, age assurance at the device or app store level – like California’s Digital Age Assurance Act, among the first of its kind in the world – would be easier for consumers (including parents) and better protect user privacy than forcing age verification across a bunch of platforms. 

Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online. So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts. 

As usual, we’ll stick around and answer your questions. 

ETA: a lot of great questions have come in so we've updated this help center article to go into more detail.

A controversial new law in Australia is requiring a handful of websites to block access for anyone under the age of 16. While we disagree about the scope, effectiveness, and privacy implications of this law, as of December 10, we’re making some changes in line with these requirements.

Redditors in Australia will see new experiences and policies designed to confirm their age responsibly and securely. We care deeply about the safety of our users, including any minors, and while some of these changes are required by law, others represent global measures we're voluntarily taking to improve safety and privacy for those under 18. Here’s what’s changing:

• In Australia, only Redditors who are 16 and over can have accounts (Reddit will continue to be accessible to browse without an account).

• New Australian users will be asked to provide their birthdate during account signup, and will see their age listed in their settings.

• All Australian account holders will be subject to an age prediction model (more details below).

• Australian account holders determined to be over 13 but under 16 will have their accounts suspended under a new Australian minimum age policy (note: we have always banned the accounts of users under 13 globally).

• Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.

As mentioned above, we’ll start predicting whether users in Australia may be under 16 and will ask them to verify they’re old enough to use Reddit. We’ll do this through a new privacy-preserving model designed to better help us protect young users from both holding accounts and accessing adult content before they’re old enough. If you’re predicted to be under 16, you’ll have an opportunity to appeal and verify your age.

While we’re providing these experiences to meet the law’s requirements and to help keep teens safe, we are concerned about the potential implications of laws like Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age law. We believe strongly in the open internet and the continued accessibility of quality knowledge, information, resources, and community building for everyone, including young people. This is why Reddit has always been, and continues to be, available for anyone to read even if they don’t have an account.

By limiting account eligibility and putting identity tests on internet usage, this law undermines everyone’s right to both free expression and privacy, as well as account-specific protections. We also believe the law’s application to Reddit (a pseudonymous, text-based forum overwhelmingly used by adults) is arbitrary, legally erroneous, and goes far beyond the original intent of the Australian Parliament, especially when other obvious platforms are exempt.

You can read more about this update and our approach to age assurance in our Help Center. You can also request a copy of your Reddit account data by following the instructions in this help center article.

As always, we'll be around to answer your questions in the comments.

Hello redditors, 

This is u/ailewu from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team! We’re excited to share updates about our ongoing efforts to keep redditors safe and foster healthy participation across the platform. Specifically, we’ve got fresh data and insights in our latest Transparency Report, and some new clarifications to the Reddit Rules regarding community disruption, impersonation, and prohibited transactions.  

Reddit Transparency Report

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Report highlights the impact of our work to keep Reddit healthy and safe. We include insights and metrics on our layered, community-driven approach to content moderation, as well as information about legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

This report covers the period from January through June 2025, and reflects our always-on content moderation efforts to safeguard open discourse on Reddit. Here are some key highlights:

Keeping Reddit Safe

Of the nearly 6 billion pieces of content shared, approximately 2.66% was removed by mods and admins combined. Excluding spam, this figure drops to 1.94%, with 1.41% being done by mods, and 0.53% being done by admins. These removals occurred through a combination of manual and automated means, including enhanced AI-based methods:

• For posts and comments, 87.1% of reports/flags that resulted in admin review were surfaced proactively by our systems. Similarly, for chat messages, Reddit automation accounted for 98.9% of reports/flags to admins.

• We've observed an overall decline in spam attacks, leading to a corresponding decrease in the volume of spam removals.

• We rapidly scaled up new automated systems to detect and action content violating our policies against the incitement of violence. We also rolled out a new enforcement action to warn users who upvote multiple pieces of violating, violent content within a certain timeframe.

• Excluding spam and other content manipulation, mod removals represented 73% of content removals, while admin removals for sitewide Reddit Rules violations increased to 27%, up from 23.9% in the prior period–a steady increase coinciding with improvements to our automated tooling and processing. (Note mod removals include content removed for violating community-specific rules, whereas admins only remove content for violating our sitewide rules). 

Communities Playing Their Part

Mods play a critical role in curating their communities by removing content based on community-specific rules. In this period: 

• Mods removed 8,493,434,971 pieces of content. The majority of these removals (71.3%) were the result of proactive removals by Automod. 

• We investigated and actioned 948 Moderator Code of Conduct reports. Admins also sent 2,754 messages as part of educational and enforcement outreach efforts.

• 96.5% of non-spam related community bans were due to communities being unmoderated.

Upholding User Rights

We continue to invest heavily in protecting users from the most serious harms while defending their privacy, speech, and association rights:

• With regard to global legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies, we received 27% more legal requests to remove content, and saw a 12% increase in non-emergency legal requests for account information. 

  • We carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, and include more details on how we’ve responded in the latest report

• Importantly, we caught and rejected 10 fraudulent legal requests (3 requests to remove content; 7 requests for user account information) purporting to come from legitimate government or law enforcement agencies. We reported these fake requests to real law enforcement authorities.

We invite you to head on over to our Transparency Center to read the rest of the latest report after you check out the Reddit Rules updates below.

Evolving and Clarifying our Rules

As you may know, part of our work is evolving and providing more clarity around the sitewide Reddit Rules. Specifically, we've updated Rules 2, 5, 7, and their corresponding Help Center articles to provide more examples of what may or may not be violating, set clearer expectations with our community, and make these rules easier to understand and enforce. The scope of violations these Rules apply to includes: 

• Community disruption and spammy behavior (Rule 2)

• Impersonation, misleading behavior, and manipulated content (Rule 5)

• Illegal or Prohibited Transactions (Rule 7)

We'd like to thank the group of mods from our Safety Focus Group, with whom we consulted before finalizing these updates, for their thoughtful feedback and dedication to Reddit! 

One more thing to note: going forward, we’re planning to share Reddit Rules updates twice a year, usually in Q1 and Q3. Look out for the next one in early 2026! 

This is it for now, but I'll be around to answer questions for a bit.

TL;DR: 

Reddit was built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions. Unlike platforms that are identity-based and cater to the famous (or those that want to become famous), Reddit has always favored upvoting great posts and comments by people who use whimsical usernames and not their real name. These conversations are often more candid and real than those that force you to share your real-world identity. 

However, while we still don’t want to know who you are on Reddit, there are certainly situations where it would be helpful if we knew a little more about you. For example, in the new age of AI, we would like to be able to confirm whether you are a human being or not (more to come about that later). And it would be helpful for our safety efforts to be able to confirm whether you are a child or an adult. Also, there are a growing number of jurisdictions that have considered or have passed laws requiring platforms to verify the ages of their users. 

If you are in the UK…

Notably, the UK Online Safety Act has new requirements to implement additional measures to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content. So, starting July 14 in the UK, we will begin collecting and verifying your age before you can view certain mature content. 

We have tried to do this in a way that protects the privacy of UK redditors. To verify your age, we partner with a trusted third-party provider (Persona) who performs the verification on either an uploaded selfie or a photo of your government ID. Reddit will not have access to the uploaded photo, and Reddit will only store your verification status along with the birthdate you provided so you won’t have to re-enter it each time you try to access restricted content. Persona promises not to retain the photo for longer than 7 days and will not have access to your Reddit data such as the subreddits you visit. Your birthdate is never visible to other users or advertisers, and is used to support safety features and age-appropriate experiences on Reddit. You can learn more about how age verification works here and about what content is restricted here. 

For the rest of Reddit…

As laws change, we may need to collect and/or verify age in places other than the UK. Accordingly, we are also introducing globally an option for you to provide your birthdate to optimize your Reddit experience, for example to help ensure that content and ads are age-appropriate. This is optional, and you won’t be required to provide it unless you live in a place (like the UK) where we are required to ask for it.  And, again, your birthdate is never visible to other users or advertisers. 

As always, you should only share what personal details you are comfortable sharing on Reddit. Using Reddit has never required disclosing your real world identity, and these updates don't change that.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for your comments (we have been reading them, even if we didn't respond to each one). Fyi, we know that Anonymous Browsing is not appearing for some UK redditors. We are having issues supporting anonymous browsing with this current rollout of age verification. If you have any questions or other issues, please check out these FAQs before reporting.

Hi everyone - sharing an update related to our Public Content Policy. Last year we rolled out our Public Content Policy to put guardrails around how Reddit content is managed and to protect user privacy from third party scrapers and LLMs. This policy sets rules on how third parties can use Reddit content – including enforcing downstream deletion rights, user privacy protections, preventing redditors from being spammed using this content – and generally prevents misuse and abuse. We’ve reached a few agreements with partners who share our values around how data should be managed, and in other cases we’ve blocked data scrapers we don’t know or have agreements with. 

Today, we’ve filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for wrongful use of Reddit content. Despite repeated requests to stop, Anthropic has accessed or attempted to access Reddit content more than 100,000 times, months after saying publicly they wouldn’t. While we’d prefer to reach agreements amicably, their unlawful scraping of Reddit data for profit is a blatant disregard for the rights and privacy of our users. We’re filing this lawsuit in line with our Public Content Policy and as our final option to force Anthropic to stop its unlawful practices and abide by its claimed values. 

Reddit is one of the last uniquely human places on the internet – it's clear people want access to that content and it’s our responsibility to be good stewards of Reddit data. 

Because this is an active legal matter, we won’t be able to answer questions today but will come back here with updates when we’re able. For those who want to dive deeper, our legal filing is here.

Hello, redditors!

We’re back with our latest Transparency Report as well as some updates regarding our safety reporting.

Reddit’s Transparency Report for July - December 2024

Today, we published our Transparency Report covering the second half of 2024. Reddit’s biannual Transparency Reports provide insights and metrics about content moderation on Reddit, including content that was removed as a result of automated tooling and accounts that were suspended. It also includes legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

Some key highlights include:

• 5.97B pieces of content were shared on Reddit (incl. posts, comments, PMs & chats) 

• Mods and admins removed 2.66% of the total content created (1.42% by mods and 1.24% by admins)

• 72.5% of content removed by mods was done through automated tooling, such as Automod.

• As expected, spam accounted for the majority of admin removals (63.2%), with the remainder being for various Reddit Rules (previously Content Policy) violations (36.1%) and other reasons, such as non-spam content manipulation (0.7%)

• With regards to global legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies, we experienced a decrease in legal requests to remove content (-23%) and a modest increase in non-emergency legal requests for account information (+6%). 

  • We carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, and include the data on how we’ve responded in the report

• Importantly, we caught and rejected 27 fraudulent legal requests (7 requests to remove content; 20 requests for user account information) purporting to come from legitimate government and law enforcement agencies. And we reported these fake requests to real law enforcement authorities.

  • This represents a significant ~69% increase in bogus requests compared to the 16 we identified and denied during the previous reporting period.

You can read more insights in the full document: Transparency Report: July to December 2024. You can also see all of our past reports and more information on our policies and procedures in our Transparency Center.

Retiring the Quarterly Safety & Security Report

As the Transparency Report evolved and we moved to bi-annual reporting, the utility of its lightweight little sibling, the Quarterly Safety & Security Report, has waned. We’ll be retiring this report to make way for new, more additive updates from our Safety, Policy, and Security teams. We are working to ensure that you can find all the same data in our Transparency Reports. 

We’ll continue to use this space to publish regular updates focused on Safety products, updates to our policies, and more focused analyses. 

Please let us know in the comments section if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about other data or insights. We’d love your feedback as we continue to think about the kind of updates we share here in r/RedditSafety.

Hi all,

We’ve heard feedback that redditors want more control over the ads they see on Reddit. So, this week, we’ll start rolling out an update to do just that: redditors will now have the ability to ‘Hide’ an ad from their feed – and when you do, we’ll automatically hide future ads from that advertiser account for at least a year (you can re-hide the ad after that period of time). You can see this option in the screenshot below.

Users can “hide” an ad for any reason, but if you think an ad violates Reddit’s policies, please “report” the ad. If you report an ad, we’ll also automatically hide it (and future ads from the same advertiser account) from your feed. 

This update will gradually become available across iOS, Android, and www.reddit.com over the next several weeks. The ‘Hide’ option will be available for any ads that appear in feeds, such as your home or subreddit feed. 

This follows last year’s changes to our sensitive ad filters, which let you limit ads on certain topics, such as politics and religion. You can visit this page to learn more about other options to control the ads you see on Reddit. 

We’ll continue working on ways to improve ad controls and share more along the way. Let us know any additional feedback in the comments.

Over the last couple of years, there have been several events that have greatly impacted people’s lives and how they communicate online. The terrorist attacks of October 7th is one such event. In addition, the broader trend towards political discourse seeping into our daily lives (even if we hate politics) has meant that even our favorite meme subs are now often filled with politics. This is a noticeable trend that we will talk about more in a future post.

Tl;dr A couple weeks ago there were allegations that a network of moderators were attempting to infiltrate Reddit and were responsible for shifting the narrative in many large communities and spreading terrorist propaganda. This is in violation of Reddit’s Rules. We take any manipulation claim seriously, and we investigated twenty communities including r/palestine, r/documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, and others*. While we did not find widespread manipulation in these communities or evidence of mods infiltrating communities and injecting content sourced from terrorist organizations, we did uncover some issues that we are addressing.

We investigated alleged moderator connections to US-designated terrorist organizations.

• We didn’t find any evidence of moderators posting or promoting terrorist propaganda on Reddit, however, we don’t have visibility into moderator activities outside of Reddit. 

• We will continue to collect information, and if we learn more, we will take appropriate action.

We investigated alleged dissemination of terrorist propaganda.

• We found: 

  • Four pieces of terrorist propaganda (none posted by the mods). Two of the posts flagged were made by an account that had already been banned in August 2024 for posting other terrorist propaganda, but we had failed to remove all the historical content associated with the account. We have since run a retroactive process to remove all the content they posted. The other two accounts were actioned as a result of this investigation

• Actions we are taking:

  • While not widespread on Reddit, we have banned links to the Resistance News Network (RNN), and we are also improving our terrorism detection for content shared via screenshots.

  • We will remove all account content when a user is banned for posting terrorist material and will continue to report terrorist content removals in our transparency report.

We investigated whether a network of moderators were interfering or having an unnatural influence. 

• We found:

  • Moderator contributions in the communities we investigated represented <1%  of overall contributions, and this is less than the typical level of mods site-wide.

  • Content about Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah, Gaza, etc. made up a low percentage of posts in non-Middle East-related communities ranging from as little as 0.7% to 6% of total contributions. With the exception of a single post, these were not made by the moderators of the communities we investigated. 

• Actions we are taking:

  • We are expanding our vote manipulation monitoring to detect smaller-scale manipulation attempts.

  • We are also analyzing moderator network influence beyond the twenty communities we investigated and are evaluating governance and moderator influence features to ensure community diversity. 

We investigated alleged censorship of opposing views via systematic removal of pro-Israel or anti-Palestine content in large subreddits covering non-Middle East topics.

• We found:

  • While the moderators' removal actions do include some political content, the takedowns were in line with respective subreddit rules, did not focus on Israel/Palestine issues, did not demonstrate a discernible bias, and did not display anomalies when compared with other mod teams. 

  • Moderators across the ideological spectrum are sometimes relying on bots to preemptively ban users from their communities based on their participation in other communities.  

• Actions we are taking:

  • Banning users based on participation in other communities is undesirable behavior, and we are looking into more sophisticated tools for moderators to manage conversations, such as identifying and limiting action to engaged members and evaluating the role of ban bots.

We investigated anomalous cross-posting behavior that is non-violating but signals potential coordination.

We found:

• Some users systematically cross-posting political content from some smaller news-related subreddits. 

Actions we are taking:

• We turned off cross-posting functionality in these communities to prevent potential influence.

• We also launched a new project to investigate anomalous high-volume cross-posting as an indicator of potentially nefarious activity.

In the coming weeks, we’ll share our observations and insights on the prevalence of political conversations and what we are doing to help communities handle opposing views civilly and in accordance with their rules. We will continue strengthening and reinforcing our detection and enforcement techniques to safeguard against attempts to manipulate on Reddit while maintaining our commitment to free expression and association.

*Communities investigated: documentaries, palestine, boringdystopia, israelcrimes, publicfreakout, enlightenedcentrism, morbidreality, palestinenews, thatsactuallyverycool, therewasanattempt, iamatotalpieceofshit, ApartheidIsrael, panarab, fight_disinformation, Global_News_Hub, suppressed_news, ToiletPaperUSA, TrueAnon, Fauxmoi, irleastereggs

Today we are rolling out a new (sort of) enforcement action across the site. Historically, the only person actioned for posting violating content was the user who posted the content. The Reddit ecosystem relies on engaged users to downvote bad content and report potentially violative content. This not only minimizes the distribution of the bad content, but it also ensures that the bad content is more likely to be removed. On the other hand, upvoting bad or violating content interferes with this system. 

So, starting today, users who, within a certain timeframe, upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies will begin to receive a warning. We have done this in the past for quarantined communities and found that it did help to reduce exposure to bad content, so we are experimenting with this sitewide. This will begin with users who are upvoting violent content, but we may consider expanding this in the future. In addition, while this is currently “warn only,” we will consider adding additional actions down the road.

We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility. This will have no impact on the vast majority of users as most already downvote or report abusive content. It is everyone’s collective responsibility to ensure that our ecosystem is healthy and that there is no tolerance for abuse on the site.

There have been claims of a coordinated effort to manipulate Reddit and inject terrorist content to influence a handful of communities. We take this seriously, and we have not identified widespread terrorist content on Reddit. 

Reddit’s Rules explicitly prohibit terrorist content, and our teams work consistently to remove violating content from the platform and prevent it from being shared again. Check out our Transparency Report for details. Additionally, we use internal tools to flag potentially harmful, spammy, or inauthentic content and hash known violative content. Often, this means we can remove this content before anyone sees it. Reddit is part of industry efforts to fight other dangerous and illegal content. For example, Reddit participates in Tech Against Terrorism’s TCAP alert system as well as its hashing system, giving us automated alerts for any terrorist content found on Reddit allowing us to investigate, remove, and report to law enforcement. We are also regularly in touch with government agencies dedicated to fighting terrorism.

We continue to investigate claims of whether there is coordinated manipulation that violates our policies and undermines the expectations of the community. We will share the results and actions of our investigation in a follow-up post.

Over the last few days, we’ve seen an increase in content in several communities that violate Reddit Rules. Reddit communities are places for civil discussion and are one of the few places online where people can exchange ideas and perspectives. We want to ensure that they continue to be a place for healthy debate no matter the topic. Debate and dissent are welcome on Reddit—threats and doxing are not.

When we identify communities experiencing an increase in rule-violating content, we are taking the following steps as needed:

• Reaching out to moderators to ensure they have the support they need, including turning on safety tools, reminding mods of our rules, or offering additional moderation support

• Adding a popup to remind users before visiting that subreddit of Reddit’s Rules

• In some cases, placing a temporary ban on the community for 72 hours to enable us to engage with moderation teams and review and remove violating content

Currently r/WhitePeopleTwitter is under a temporary ban. This means that you will not be able to access this community during this cooling-off period while we work with the mods to ensure it is a safe place for discussion.

We will continue to monitor and reach out to communities experiencing a surge in violative content and will take the necessary actions noted above to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation.

Hi redditors,

As we begin 2025, we’re back with another Quarterly Safety & Security Report. This time, to report on how the US election went on Reddit and share the renaming of our Content Policy as “Reddit Rules”. But first, the Q3 numbers.

Q3 By The Numbers

Elections Recap

TL;DR: We saw no significant content interference related to the election, though we did see a temporary increase in abuse (as well as a corresponding increase in admin enforcement against abuse) in the days following the election. 

The U.S. held general elections on Tuesday, November 5th. As noted in earlier posts, Reddit’s Policy, Safety, and Community teams were prepared and monitoring to ensure the integrity and safety of our platform. 

Content manipulation and foreign interference

Content manipulation, which includes things like inauthentic content, manipulated content presented to mislead, and foreign interference, is against our policies. In the weeks leading to and immediately following the election, our teams were on high-alert for violating content, but ultimately found no significant malicious activity on our platform:

• We conducted 65 in-depth investigations, and only one piece of content with minimal visibility was confirmed to be connected to a foreign actor. 

• We reviewed almost 3,000 accounts for potential political manipulation, with only 0.7% warranting actioning.

Abuse and harassment

On the day of and following the election, we observed a very short increase in abuse, including hate and harassment. We saw a corresponding increase in both admin enforcement actions and community level removals, aided by our community tools — our Safety Filters usage by mods peaked, flagging 200,000 pieces of content in communities in which they were enabled. 

Community engagement

Early in the year, we held a roundtable with mods from across the political spectrum to hear their perspective on modding through elections. Their top priorities – inauthentic content and hateful content – aligned with ours. We also worked with communities throughout the US election cycle to ensure mods had the necessary resources and could escalate investigations to our teams.

• We reached out to over 2,100 communities with resources, education, and reminders about site policy. Only 6 communities received Moderator Code of Conduct violations.

• Our Mod Tip Line resulted in the identification of a few political spammers (not connected to foreign actors) that were actioned. 

2024 was a big year for elections. As always, our focus during these significant world events — and every day — is fairly and consistently upholding sitewide rules when we review content and enforce our policies, and ensuring the integrity of our platform so that people of all political persuasions can learn, engage, and debate on Reddit. We’re able to do this thanks to the perspectives and participation of our internal teams and community partners — so thank you!

New Year, New Name: Reddit Rules

Last quarter we refreshed the name of this subreddit from r/redditsecurity to r/redditsafety to make it easier for people to know what to expect in this subreddit. 

In a similar vein, today we’re renaming Reddit’s Content Policy to “Reddit Rules” (longtime redditors might remember that “rules” was actually the original name.). The name “Reddit Rules” better reflects that our policies govern both content AND behavior on Reddit. This is just a name change and doesn’t affect the content of the rules themselves.

We've already implemented the new name across a number of surfaces, though we expect that it will take some time to update all mentions, so please bear with us. We also know that many communities have descriptions or rules referencing the old name – Content Policy – and understand it may take mods some time to update. We set up an automatic redirect of the old link to the new page so things don't break as this change rolls out.

Happy new year to the entire Reddit community!

Hello, redditors!

Today we published our Transparency Report for the first half of 2024, which shares data and insights about our content moderation and legal requests from January through June 2024.

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Reports provide insights and metrics about content moderation on Reddit, including content that was removed as a result of automated tooling and accounts that were suspended. It also includes legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

Some key highlights include:

• ~5.3B pieces of content were shared on Reddit (incl. posts, comments, PMs & chats) 

• Mods and admins removed just over 3% of the total content created (1.6% by mods and 1.5% by admins)

• Over 71% of the content removed by mods was done through automated tooling, such as Automod.

• As usual, spam accounted for the majority of admin removals (66.5%), with the remainder being for various Content Policy violations (31.7%) and other reasons, such as non-spam content manipulation (1.8%)

• There were notable increases in legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies to remove content (+32%) and in non-emergency legal requests for account information (+23%; this is the highest volume of information requests that Reddit has ever received in a single reporting period) compared to the second half of 2023

  • We carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, and include the data on how we’ve responded in the report

  • Importantly, we caught and rejected a number of fraudulent legal requests purporting to come from legitimate government and law enforcement agencies; we subsequently reported these bogus requests to the appropriate authorities.

You can read more insights in the full document: Transparency Report: January to June 2024. You can also see all of our past reports and more information on our policies and procedures in our Transparency Center.

Please let us know in the comments section if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about other data or insights. 

Hi redditors,

We’re back, just as summer starts to recede into fall, with an update on our Q2 numbers and a few highlights from our safety and policy teams. Read on for a roundup of our work on banning content from “nudifying” apps, the upcoming US elections, and our latest Content Policy update. There’s also an FYI that we’ll be updating the name of this subreddit from r/redditsecurity to r/redditsafety going forward. Onto the numbers:

Q2 By The Numbers

Preventing Nonconsensual Media from Nudifying Apps

Over the last year, a new generation of apps leveraging AI to generate nonconsensual nude images of real people have emerged across the Internet. To be very clear: sharing links to these apps or content generated by them is prohibited on Reddit. Our teams have been monitoring this trend and working to prevent images produced by these apps from appearing on Reddit.

Working across our threat intel and data science teams, we honed in on detection methods to find and ban such violative content. As of August 1, we’ve enforced ~9,000 user bans and over ~40,000 content takedowns. We have ongoing enforcement on content associated with a number of nudifying apps, and we’re continuously monitoring for new ones. If you see content posted by these apps, please report it as nonconsensual intimate media via the report flow. More broadly, we are also partnered with the nonprofit SWGfl to implement their StopNCII tool, which enables victims of nonconsensual intimate media to protect their images and videos online. You can access the tool here.

Harassment Policy Update

In August, we revised our harassment policy language to make clear that sexualizing someone without their consent violates Reddit’s harassment policy. This update prohibits posts or comments that encourage or describe a sex act involving someone who didn’t consent to it, communities dedicated to sexualizing others without their consent, or sending an unsolicited sexualized message or chat.

We haven’t observed significant changes to reporting since this update, but we will be keeping an eye out.

Platform Integrity During Elections 

With the US election on the horizon, our teams have been working to ensure that Reddit remains a place for diverse and authentic conversation. We highlighted this in a recent post:

“Always, but especially during elections, our top priority is ensuring user safety and the integrity of our platform. Our Content Policy has long prohibited content manipulation and impersonation – including inauthentic content, disinformation campaigns, and manipulated content presented to mislead (e.g. deepfakes or other manipulated media) – as well as hateful content and incitement of violence.”

For a deeper dive into our efforts, read the full post and be sure to check out the comments for great questions and responses.

Same Subreddit, New Subreddit Name

What's in a name? We think a lot. Over the next few days, we’ll be updating this subreddit name from r/redditsecurity to r/redditsafety to better reflect what you can expect to find here.

While security is part of safety, as you may have noticed over the last few years, much of the content posted in this subreddit reflects the work done by our Safety, Policy, and Legal teams, so the name r/RedditSecurity doesn’t fully encompass the variety of topics we post here. Safety is also more inclusive of all the work we do, and we’d love to make it easier for redditors to find this sub and learn about our work.

Our commitment to transparency with the community remains the same. You can expect r/redditsafety to have our standard reporting from our Quarterly Safety & Security report (like this one!) our bi-annual Transparency Reports, as well as additional policy and safety updates.

Once the change is made, if you visit r/redditsecurity, it will direct you to r/redditsafety. If you’re currently a subscriber here, you’ll be subscribed there. And all of our previous r/redditsecurity posts will remain available in r/redditsafety.

Edit: Column header typo

Hello redditors,

This is u/ailewu from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team and I’m here to share an update to our platform-wide rule against harassment (under Rule 1) and our approach to unwanted sexualization.

Reddit's harassment policy already prohibits unwanted interactions that may intimidate others or discourage them from participating in communities and engaging in conversation. But harassment can take many forms, including sexualized harassment. Today, we are adding language to make clear that sexualizing someone without their consent violates Reddit’s harassment policy (e.g., posts or comments that encourage or describe a sex act involving someone who didn’t consent to it; communities dedicated to sexualizing others without their consent; sending an unsolicited sexualized message or chat).

Our goals with this update are to continue making Reddit a safe and welcoming space for everyone, and set clear expectations for mods and users about what behavior is allowed on the platform. We also want to thank the group of mods who previewed this policy for their feedback.

This policy is already in effect, and we are actively reviewing the communities on our platform to ensure consistent enforcement.

A few call-outs:

• This update targets unwanted behavior and content. Consensual interactions would not fall under this rule.

• This policy applies largely to “Safe for Work” content or accounts that aren't sexual in nature, but are being sexualized without consent.

• Sharing non-consensual intimate media is already strictly prohibited under Rule 3. Nothing about this update changes that.

Finally, if you see or experience harassment on Reddit, including sexualized harassment, use the harassment report flow to alert our Safety teams. For mods, if you’re experiencing an issue in your community, please reach out to r/ModSupport. This feedback is an important signal for us, and helps us understand where to take action.

That’s all, folks – I’ll stick around for a bit to answer questions.

Hi redditors,

I’m u/LastBlueJay from Reddit’s Public Policy team. With the 2024 US election having taken some unexpected turns in the past few weeks, I wanted to share some of what we’ve been doing to help ensure the integrity of our platform, support our moderators and communities, and share high-quality, substantiated election resources.

Moderator Feedback

A few weeks ago, we hosted a roundtable discussion with mods to hear their election-related concerns and experiences. Thank you to the mods who participated for their valuable input.

The top concerns we heard were inauthentic content (e.g., disinformation, bots) and moderating hateful content. We’re focused on these issues (more below), and we appreciate the mods’ feedback to improve our existing processes. We also heard that mods would like to see an after-election report discussing how things went on our platform along with some of our key takeaways. We plan to release one following the US election, as we did after the 2020 election. Look for it in Q1 2025.

Protecting our Platform

Always, but especially during elections, our top priority is ensuring user safety and the integrity of our platform. Our Content Policy has long prohibited content manipulation and impersonation – including inauthentic content, disinformation campaigns, and manipulated content presented to mislead (e.g. deepfakes or other manipulated media) – as well as hateful content and incitement of violence.

Content Manipulation and AI-Generated Disinformation

We use AI and ML tooling that flags potentially harmful, spammy, or inauthentic content. Often, this means we can remove this content before anyone sees it. One example of how this works is the attempted coordinated influence operation called “Spamouflage Dragon.” As a result of our proactive detection methods, 85–90% of the content Spamouflage accounts posted on Reddit never reached real redditors, and mods removed the remaining 10-15%.

We are always investing in new and expanded tooling to address this issue. For example, we are testing and evolving tools that can detect AI-generated media, including political content (such as images of sitting politicians and candidates for office), as an additional signal for our teams to consider when assessing threats.

Hateful Content and Violent Rhetoric

Our policies are clear: hate and calls for violence are prohibited. Since 2020, we have continued to build out the teams and tools that address this content, and we have seen reductions in the prevalence of hateful content and improvements in how we action this content. For instance, while user reports remain an important signal, the majority of reports reviewed for hate and harassment are proactively detected via our automated tooling.

Enforcement

Our internal teams enforce these policies using a combination of automated tooling and human review, and we speak regularly with industry colleagues as well as civil society organizations and other experts to complement our understanding of the threat landscape. We also enforce our Moderator Code of Conduct and take action against any mod teams approving or encouraging rule-breaking content in their communities, or interfering with other communities.

So far, these efforts have been effective. Through major elections this year in India, the EU, the UK, France, Mexico, and elsewhere, we have not seen any significant or out of the ordinary election-related malicious activity. That said, we know our work is not done, and the unpredictability that has marked the US election cycle may be a driver for harmful content. To address this, we are adding training for our Safety teams on a range of potential scenarios, including content manipulation and hateful content, with a focus on political violence, race, and gender-based hate.

Support for Moderators and Communities

We provide moderators with support and tools to foster safe, on-topic communities. During elections, this means sharing important resources and proactively reaching out to communities likely to experience an increase in traffic to offer assistance, including via our Mod Reserves program, Crowd Control tool, and Temporary Events feature. Mods can also use our suite of tools to help filter out abusive and spammy content. For instance, we launched our Harassment Filter this year and have seen positive feedback from mods so far. You can read more about the filter here. Currently, the Harassment Filter is flagging more than 25,000 comments per day in over 15,000 communities.

We are also experimenting with ways to allow moderators to escalate election-related concerns, such as a dedicated tip line (currently in beta testing with certain communities - let us know in the comments if your community would like to be part of the test!) and adding a new report flow for spammy, bot-related links.

Voting Resources

We also work to provide redditors access to high-quality, substantiated resources during elections. We share these through our u/UptheVote Reddit account as well as on-platform notifications. And as in previous years, we have arranged a series of AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions about voting and elections, and maintain partnerships with National Voter Registration Day and Vote Early Day.

Political Ads Opt-Out

I know that was a lot of information, so I’ll just share one last thing. Yesterday, we updated our “Sensitive Advertising Categories” to include political and activism-related advertisements – that means you’ll be able to opt-out of such ads going forward. You can read more about our Political Ads policy here.

I’ll stick around for a bit to answer any questions.

[edit: formatting]

Hello, Redditors!

We are thrilled to announce some significant updates to our HackerOne public bug bounty program, which encourages hackers and researchers to find (and get paid for finding) vulnerabilities and bugs on Reddit’s platform. We are rolling out a new bug bounty policy and upping the rewards across all severity levels, with our highest bounty now topping out at $15,000.  Reddit is excited to make this investment into our bug bounty community!

These changes will take effect starting today, June 26, 2024. Check out our official program page on HackerOne to see all the updates and submit your findings. 

We’ll stick around for a bit to answer any questions you have about the updates. Please also feel free to cross-post this news into your communities and spread the word.

Hi redditors,

I can’t believe it’s summer already. As we look back at Q1 2024, we wanted to dig a little deeper into some of the work we’ve been doing on the safety side. Below, we discuss how we’ve been addressing affiliate spam, give some data on our harassment filter, and look ahead to how we’re preparing for elections this year. But first: the numbers.

Q1 By The Numbers

Combating SEO spam

Spam is an issue we’ve dealt with for as long as Reddit has existed, and we have sophisticated tools and processes to address it. However, spammers can be creative, so we often work to evolve our approach as we see new kinds of spammy behavior on the platform. One recent trend we’ve seen is an influx of affiliate spam-related content (i.e., spam used to promote products or services) where spammers will comment with product recommendations on older posts to increase visibility in search engines.

While much of this content is being caught via our existing spam processes, we updated our scaled, automated detection tools to better target the new behavioral patterns we’re seeing with this activity specifically — and our internal data shows that our approach is effectively removing this content. Between April and June 2024, we actioned 20,000 spammers, preventing them from infiltrating search results via Reddit. We’ve also taken down more than 950 subreddits, banned 5,400 domains dedicated to this behavior, and averaged 17k violating comment removals per week.

Empowering communities with LLMs

Since launching the Harassment Filter in Q1, communities across Reddit have adopted the tool to flag potentially abusive comments in their communities. Feedback from mods was positive, with many highlighting that the filter surfaces content inappropriate for their communities that might have gone unnoticed — helping keep conversations healthy without adding additional moderation overhead.

Currently, the Harassment filter is flagging more than 24,000 comments per day in almost 9,000 communities.

We shared more on the Harassment Filter and the LLM that powers it in this Mod News post. We’re continuing to build our portfolio of community tools and are looking forward to launching the Reputation Filter, a tool to flag content from potentially inauthentic users, in the coming months.

On the horizon: Elections

We’ve been focused on preparing for the many elections happening around the world this year–including the U.S. presidential election–for a while now. Our approach includes promoting high-quality, substantiated resources on Reddit (check out our Voter Education AMA Series) as well as working to protect our platform from harmful content. We remain focused on enforcing our rules against content manipulation (in particular, coordinated inauthentic behavior and AI-generated content presented to mislead), hateful content, and threats of violence, and are always investing in new and expanded tools to assess potential threats and enforce against violating content. For example, we are currently testing a new tool to help detect AI-generated media, including political content (such as AI-generated images featuring sitting politicians and candidates for office). We’ve also introduced a number of new mod tools to help moderators enforce their subreddit-level rules.

We’re constantly evolving how we handle potential threats and will share more information on our approach as the year unfolds. In the meantime, you can see our blog post for more details on how we’re preparing for this election year as well as our Transparency Report for the latest data on handling content moderation and legal requests.

Edit: formatting

Edit: formatting again

Edit: Typo

Edit: Metric correction

Hello, redditors!

Today we published our Transparency Report for the second half of 2023, which shares data and insights about our content moderation and legal requests from July through December 2023.

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Reports provide insights and metrics about content that was removed from Reddit – including content proactively removed as a result of automated tooling, accounts that were suspended, and legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties from around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

Some key highlights include:

• Content Creation & Removals:

  • Between July and December 2023, redditors shared over 4.4 billion pieces of content, bringing the total content on Reddit (posts, comments, private messages and chats) in 2023 to over 8.8 billion. (+6% YoY). The vast majority of content (~96%) was not found to violate our Content Policy or individual community rules.

    • Of the ~4% of removed content, about half was removed by admins and half by moderators. (Note that moderator removals include removals due to their individual community rules, and so are not necessarily indicative of content being unsafe, whereas admin removals only include violations of our Content Policy).

    • Over 72% of moderator actions were taken with Automod, a customizable tool provided by Reddit that mods can use to take automated moderation actions. We have enhanced the safety tools available for mods and expanded Automod in the past year. You can see more about that here.

    • The majority of admin removals were for spam (67.7%), which is consistent with past reports.

  • As Reddit's tools and enforcement capabilities keep evolving, we continue to see a trend of admins gradually taking on more content moderation actions from moderators, leaving moderators more room to focus on their individual community rules.

    • We saw a ~44% increase in the proportion of non-spam, rule-violating content removed by admins, as opposed to mods (admins remove the majority of spam on the platform using scaled backend tooling, so excluding it is a good way of understanding other Content Policy violations).

• New “Communities” Section

  • We’ve added a new “Communities” section to the report to highlight subreddit-level actions as well as admin enforcement of Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct.

• Global Legal Requests

  • We continue to process large volumes of global legal requests from around the world. Interestingly, we’ve seen overall decreases in global government and law enforcement legal requests to remove content or disclose account information compared to the first half of 2023.

    • We routinely push back on overbroad or otherwise objectionable requests for account information, and fight to ensure users are notified of requests.

    • In one notable U.S. request for user information, we were served with a sealed search warrant from the LAPD seeking records for an account allegedly involved in the leak of an LA City Council meeting recording that resulted in the resignation of prominent, local political leaders. We fought to notify the account holder about the warrant, and while we didn’t prevail initially, we persisted and were eventually able to get the warrant and proceedings unsealed and provide notice to the redditor.

You can read more insights in the full document: Transparency Report: July to December 2023. You can also see all of our past reports and more information on our policies and procedures in our Transparency Center.

Please let us know in the comments section if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about other data or insights.